Fall into a Black Hole!

Play our intergalactic adventures board game and be the first to explore a black hole and live to tell about it!

You will also visit such interesting places as a giant array of radio telescopes in the New Mexico desert and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Then you will blast into space and visit the Earth-orbiting Japanese VSOP Radio Telescope and Russia's RadioAstron telescope.

You will leave Earth orbit and go on to explore other galaxies, an interstellar gas cloud, a neutron star, and finally, a black hole! You will earn "Antigravity Tokens" along the way, so that you will be able to escape from the black hole's tremendous gravitational force.

This is a game for 2, 3, or 4 players. The game board covers six 8-1/2 x 11-inch pages.

Be sure to set your printer to print "Landscape," not "Portrait"!

Or, you can print the full-size board (25 x 25 inches) on an over-sized printer.

Cut off the white borders on each page and tape the pieces together. You will also print and cut out Adventure Cards, Antigravity Tokens, and player markers. To make the player markers easy to handle, we suggest you glue them onto buttons, pebbles, bottle caps, corks, or some other small objects. You will also need a single die (one of a pair of dice) or a spinner from another game that has only numbers 1 through 6.

Telescopes working together . . .

Exploring black holes from a safe distance is one of the jobs of the international Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry Program (Whew! SVLBI for short). SVLBI is bringing together radio telescopes around the world and in space to create a huge "virtual radio telescope" larger than Earth.

The technology of combining observations from several telescopes some distance apart is called interferometry. Using this technology, astronomers will study the farthest and most mysterious objects in the universe—objects such as quasars, neutron stars, supernovae, and, yes, black holes!

By Subject

By Type

Telescopes working together . . .

Exploring black holes from a safe distance is one of the jobs of the international Space Very Long Baseline Interferometry Program (Whew! SVLBI for short). SVLBI is bringing together radio telescopes around the world and in space to create a huge "virtual radio telescope" larger than Earth.

The technology of combining observations from several telescopes some distance apart is called interferometry. Using this technology, astronomers will study the farthest and most mysterious objects in the universe—objects such as quasars, neutron stars, supernovae, and, yes, black holes!